Restaurant analytics startup Delaget is experiencing massive growth as top dining brands have shifted their models after peak Covid.
Delaget, based in St. Louis Park, set a goal of 50% revenue growth for this year – but it’s instead on a trajectory to hit 70% growth. That’s after 30% growth over the last two years. The software-as-a-service platform optimizes and consolidates restaurant technologies from drive-thru timers to point-of-sales systems to video surveillance tech.
The company currently works with 18,000 restaurants, which has ballooned from 10,000 at the end of 2021. At the end of last year, the company contracted with 62 brands. In the first six months of this year, it’s already working with 105 brands.
The market was upturned by the pandemic, and delivery became critical for all types of restaurants, according to Delaget CEO Jason Tober. Tons of restaurants scrambled to sign up with the delivery apps like Doordash. He said the shift turned out to last longer than expected and consumers are interacting with restaurants differently.
Before 2020, the typical restaurant was doing less than 1% of its sales in delivery. Now, even after lockdowns have faded, the average Delaget restaurant customer is getting 12%-40% of their revenue through delivery.
Besides that, there’s a growth in mobile ordering apps and associated rewards, to which Delaget’s platform can also cater.
Delaget’s customers include franchisees and franchisors from brands like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, IHOP, Hard Rock Café, Popeye’s and others. The company has about 70 employees, most of which are in the Twin Cities.
The company has been around for years, but the current analytics platform was launched in the first quarter of 2020. Reestablishing right before the pandemic turned out to be a “black swan moment” for Delaget. Restaurants had to be agile, and no-contact dining options like drive-thru and delivery are such data-driven models.
“So that's been one of the tectonic changes,” he said. “We were ahead of the market in terms of our innovation.”
Now, he said Delaget has more inbound demand than it can keep up with.
He added that there’s usually a lot of turnover in the SaaS world, but for his company, “our churn is negligible ... when we get a customer, we keep them.”
